all the mirroring worlds all the milk
spilled and caught and swallowed
and smoothed across the face of the moon
~ Lisa Marie Basile from 'Traveling Time'

Galaxies internal and distant in THEthe Poetry

Teaming up to share poems across the oceans, THEthe Poetry and Red Room Poetry introduced new audiences to the works of emerging and established poets from America and Australia. Weekly installments of poems, interviews and artworks celebrated poetic observations from Brooklyn to Sydney and places between.

Poetic reflections on being a woman in the 21st Century

Being a woman in the 21st Century has its charges. It depends on the decade and the day. We have the freedom women in the past never envisioned, or never achieved, but let’s put a positive spin on this. It is glorious, despite what drags us often down. We rise. The difference, now, is the verve with which we arm ourselves – that is what makes the 21st Century woman.

The following four poets were asked to let this theme infiltrate their poetry. Chloe Yelena Miller’s 'Hunger', focuses on food, smell and the past – a poem about the maternal and memory, but also a poem about the domestic. Laura Cronk also writes about the domestic doings of a woman in the 21st Century, “Up pen/Down pen/Up block/Down block/Up crust/Down crust”. Rebecca Melnyk’s poem 'Space' shows what is in-between the imagined and the unimagined, the self and the not-self, and “that space between walking.” Sammy Greenspan writes about the psyche of being a woman, “What do you mean this is not a straight path /What do you mean you won’t specify preference", which reads as a mirror into insecurity, judgement and doubt. Together, these display a diverse notion of what it means to be a woman in the 21st century. Their poems read like snapshots of the daily.

~ Leah Umansky for THEthe Poetry